The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

John Stewart interviews Jessica Chastain

On Wednesday's Daily Show, Jon Stewart interviewed actor Jessica Chastain, star of the film Zero Dark Thirty. There was a moment, at the end of the interview, in which she absolutely horrified me—and, it seems, him (at around 20:30):

Chastain: The cover of ... was about the CIA agent going to prison for talking to a journalist about waterboarding.
Stewart: You can waterboard, but the first rule of waterboard club—
Chastain: Don't talk about it.
Stewart: You should see it, in theaters now, Zero Dark Thirty.

She seems to believe, as far as I can tell, that torture is a fine way to run a government. Watch her, and watch him, during this exchange. She shows no hint of irony, or even awareness of the point of Stewart's joke.

Earlier in the same show, Stewart had this to say about the NRA's propaganda that "armed Jews could have stopped Hitler:"

I wish armed Jews in the ghetto could stop Hitler. My feeling was, France couldn't. And I'm pretty sure they had guns. Russia had kind of a lot of guns, and they couldn't stop Hitler, until you factored in the wind chill. It's an awful lot to put on an oppressed minority when it took the free world five to six years of all-out total war to stop that motherfucker. So let's stop arguing these "what-ifs."

I think he's had enough of the crazies lately.

American Airlines gets new livery for no apparent reason

...and it's pretty hideous:

Reactions have been a mixed bag of negative and scathing. Here's Patrick Smith:

Simply put, I cannot believe how awful a makeover this is. It’s so disappointing that it pains me even to write about it, and how anybody signed off on this I’ll never understand.

The body and tail manage to be boring and garish at the same time, with a cheap, downmarket lilt to the whole thing. The typeface is the strongest aspect of the whole mess, and that’s not saying much.

Those are (almost) forgivable aspects. Doing away with the AA symbol, however, was a tragic and unspeakably bad call.

And in its place… What exactly is that new, Amtrak-y logo? It looks like an eagle’s beak poking through a shower curtain. No other word will do: it’s horrible. If it’s not the worst corporate trademark I have ever seen, I don’t know what is.

Cranky Flier said only:

Personally, I hate that the eagle has been marginalized to the point that it’s unrecognizable. And the tail, well, yeah, the tail. I think I heard it put best in this excellent quote:

"Colgan had sex with CSA and Cubana on a Greyhound bus in the same weekend and got pregnant. We know Colgan is the mother but we can’t tell who the father is. Nor do we care because the baby is still ugly either way."

Maybe it will grow on me. Or maybe it won’t last very long anyway…

Why did they do this right now? They're weeks away from either merging or dying. Did US Airways want them to do this? No, according to CEO Tom Horton:

First, Horton said the two issues — merger and rebranding — were separate. Second, he said American needed to go ahead with the new look because in two weeks it is introducing a new flagship aircraft, the Boeing 777-300ER, that needs painting.

Horton also said US Airways had no input into the rebranding and didn’t get an advance look at it.

“We are competitors today, so we didn’t think it appropriate to discuss it with them,” Horton said. “I will tell you that on my drive home last night [Wednesday], I called my good friend Doug Parker and informed him of what we were doing as a courtesy. So I did do that, and we had a very nice chat.”

Well, there you have it. I'm sure Parker was thrilled. US Airways already said they want to keep the American Airlines brand, but I think they rather had in mind the brand from 1968, not this new stuff. Further, I think it's this kind of management thinking that got American into the position it's in today.

Josh Marshall on gun control

Yes, this is exactly right:

A big part of gun versus non-gun tribalism or mentality is tied to the difference between city and rural. And a big reason ‘gun control’ in the 70s, 80s and 90s foundered was that in the political arena, the rural areas rebelled against the city culture trying to impose its own ideas about guns on the rural areas. And there’s a reality behind this because on many fronts the logic of pervasive gun ownership makes a lot more sense in sparsely populated rural areas than it does in highly concentrated city areas.

But a huge amount of the current gun debate, the argument for the gun-owning tribe, amounts to the gun culture invading my area, my culture, my part of the country. So we’re upset about massacres so the answer is more guns. Arming everybody.

[There is] a mentality that does seem pervasive among many more determined gun rights advocates — basically that us non-gun people need to be held down as it were and made to learn that it’s okay being around people carrying loaded weapons.

Well, I don’t want to learn. That doesn't work where I live — geographically or literally.

Read the whole post.

More links, but not because I'm lazy

The fun part about UAT is that 38 known issues can become 100 known issues in just a few hours. So, once again, I have a lot of stuff to read and no time to read it:

Yay, Instapaper!

Now off to lunch, followed by more debugging.

Putting a bow on it

We're just 45 minutes from releasing a software project to our client for user acceptance testing (UAT), and we're ready. (Of course, there are those 38 "known issues..." But that's what the UAT period is for!)

When I get back from the launch meeting, I'll want to check these out:

Off to the client. Then...bug fixes!

'Tis the season

So, at the last possible moment, after much debate, my cousin and I bought our season tickets to Wrigley Field. Great view, beautiful park, possibility of a World Series this year—two out of three ain't bad.

Once again, here are the seats:

And here is the view:

I'm sure I'll post more photos from that spot over the course of the 2013 season. And I may yet finish the geas this year, despite possibly blowing my entire baseball budget this afternoon.

Probably lighter posting the rest of the week. We've got a major delivery tomorrow afternoon, and it's still not done. Ah, software development...

The records just keep breaking

We've had a more-or-less normal 24 hours in January, with temperatures between -1°C and -11°Cbog standard.

That said, we've also had the latest sub-freezing high temperature ever (January 1st), which ended the longest-ever stretch without sub-freezing high temperatures (310 days); the second-most days in a calendar year without a sub-freezing high temperature (354); and the fourth-longest stretch without 25 mm of cumulative snow (through January 5th). More records: the longest period ever without a 25 mm snowfall (325 days, still going); the longest period ever with less than 25 mm of snow on the ground (323 days, still going); and by Thursday, given the forecast, the latest-ever 25 mm-or-greater snowfall (last broken on 17 January 1899).

Meanwhile, it snowed in Jerusalem last week, an event as common as...well, snow in Los Angeles.

Now, with more extreme weather in more places, the *New!* *Improved!* Anthropogenic Climate Change! Yay!

<i>Très Misérable</i>

Cartoonist Scott Adams did not like Les Misérables:

In a pivotal scene in Les Misérables, one of the main characters finds himself in a sewer, up to his nostrils in human waste, with a bullet in his torso, while being pursued by the authorities who have just killed all of his friends. This was my favorite scene in Les Misérables because I could relate to it. Watching that f[...]g movie feels exactly like being up to your nostrils in human waste, with a bullet in your torso, after the government has killed all of your friends. The main difference is that the movie is longer. Much, much longer.

Anne Hathaway played the part of a whining, mud-caked, Halloween skeleton who blamed the system for her problems. Typical liberal. Hugh Jackman played Wolverine, I think. I didn't catch a lot of the details because it's the sort of movie that makes your mind try to crawl out of your ear hole in search of anything that isn't the movie.

Oh, to have a peek at his in-box today...

Two sentences that clarify things

James Fallows has distilled the discussion about the debt ceiling to two sentences:

Here they are:

  • Raising the debt ceiling does not authorize one single penny in additional public spending.
  • For Congress to "decide whether" to raise the debt ceiling, for programs and tax rates it has already voted into law, makes exactly as much sense as it would for a family to "decide whether" to pay a credit-card bill for goods it has already bought.

That is all.

Oh, how I really wish that were the end of it. But the Republicans in Congress, having long ago banished Rhyme and Reason to the Castle in the Air, seem determined once again to fight it once again.